677
STOP DOING ASYNC (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by Maven@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[-] snowe@programming.dev 102 points 9 months ago

This is my favorite version of this so far.

[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 33 points 9 months ago

I'm gett the ing UDP same vib joke

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[-] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 9 months ago
[-] Maven@lemmy.world 157 points 9 months ago

I PROMISE the rest will come eventually

[-] ibasaw@lemmy.world 48 points 9 months ago

that is going to take some RESOLVE

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 months ago
[-] RustyNova@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Async are lazy loaded by design in rust, so... Yeah

[-] RustyNova@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

You must .await before you can have the Result. Then you can use ?

[-] mathematicalMagpie@lemm.ee 15 points 9 months ago

For those who don't get it, it's the "stop doing science" meme.

[-] mlg@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm actually laughing out loud at the amount of whitespace because ~~thread~~ routine is still executing lmao

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 7 points 9 months ago

I honestly don't know, why async got so popular. It seems like the entire reason for doing it was that some blokes were hellbent on using JS on a server and couldn't fathom that a second thread might be a good idea.

[-] hubobes@sh.itjust.works 82 points 9 months ago

If you are waiting for IO, why would you block your current thread and not let it do something else? Async does not only exist in JS.

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[-] idunnololz@lemmy.world 48 points 9 months ago

After using both extensively I would argue async code is easier to read. It has a lot less nesting. And generally easier to read code is a good thing so I'm all for async.

[-] Lmaydev@programming.dev 40 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A huge amount of time in apps is spent waiting for IO, database or web requests to complete.

Async prevents locking a thread during this wait.

If you're handling a large amount of requests in a web server, for example, it allows other requests to progress while waiting for these operations.

Threads are also expensive to start and manage.

Also handling threads manually is a pain in the ass.

[-] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Async prevents locking a thread during this wait.

That's a very common misconception. async is just a scheduling tool that runs at the end of event loop (microtask queue). It still runs on the main thread and you can still lock up your UI. You'd need Web Workers for actual multi-threading.

[-] locuester@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago

It can lock up a UI doing cpu bound work. Making a web request, no. Preventing the ui thread from waiting on native IO is what async was created for.

[-] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Preventing the ui thread from waiting on native IO is what async was created for.

Citation needed. async just a wrapper for Promises. IO isn't related, just commonly used with it.

https://tc39.es/ecma262/multipage/control-abstraction-objects.html#sec-async-functions-abstract-operations-async-function-start

NodeJS's IO and fetch are just promises. (And NodeJS used to use callback(err, response) before adding promises.).

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[-] Bene7rddso@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

If you need to get multiple pieces of data for one request Async is great, but why would you work on different requests in the same thread? Why slow down one request because the other needs a bunch of computation?

[-] Lmaydev@programming.dev 3 points 9 months ago

You aren't slowing down anything. If you didn't use async that thread would be blocked.

You'd need a thread per request even though they are sat doing nothing while waiting for responses.

Instead when you hit an await that thread is freed for other work and when the wait is over the rest of the code is scheduled to run.

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 27 points 9 months ago

Because the alternative is a series of ridiculously nested call backs that make code hard to read and manage?

I honestly can't fathom how anyone would dislike async programming.

[-] Nyfure@kbin.social 25 points 9 months ago

Async is good because threads are expensive, might aswell do something else when you need to wait for something anyways.
But only having async and no other thread when you need some computation is obviously awful.. (or when starting anothe rthread is not easily manageable)

Thats why i like go, you just tell it you want to run something in parallel and he will manage the rest.. computational work, shift current work to new thread.. just waiting for IO, async.

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[-] Rinox@feddit.it 15 points 9 months ago

Ok, I'm a c# developer and I use async await quite extensively. Is it different in JS? Or am I missing something?

[-] dvlsg@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Nah, they're very similar, really. You generally kick IO heavy stuff you don't need immediately off to async await.

There are a few more applications of it in C# since you don't have the "single thread" to work with like in JS. And the actual implementation under the hood is different, sure. But conceptually they're similar. Pretty sure JS was heavily influenced by C#'s implementation and syntax.

[-] sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Imagine a webser or proxy and for every incoming request it creates an new thread 💣

Yes you're right if it's a second or third thread it is/may be fine. But if you're i/o bound and your application has to manage quite a lot of that stuff in parallel, there is no way around delegating that workload to the kernel's event loop. Async/Await is just a very convenient abstraction of that Ressource.

[-] PlexSheep@feddit.de 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Async rust with the Tokio Framework is pretty cool. Need none of that JS bloat for async.

[-] RustyNova@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Honestly I can't wrap my head how to effectively put computation into a thread, even with Tokio.

All I want is something like rayon where you got a task queue and you just yeet tasks into a free thread, and await when you actually need it

Might be too much JS/TS influence on me, or that I can't find a tutorial that would explain in a way that clicks for me

[-] StopSpazzing@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Tokio specifically says not to use it for CPU intensive tasks and rayon would be better for this: https://tokio.rs/tokio/tutorial

Speeding up CPU-bound computations by running them in parallel on several threads. Tokio is designed for IO-bound applications where each individual task spends most of its time waiting for IO. If the only thing your application does is run computations in parallel, you should be using rayon. That said, it is still possible to "mix & match" if you need to do both. See this blog post for a practical example

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[-] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

async/await is just callback() and queueMicrotask wrapped up into a neat package. It's not supposed to replace multi-threading and confusing it for such is dangerous since you can still stall your main/UI thread with Promises (which async also wraps).

(async and await are also technically different things, but for the sake of simplicity here, consider them a pair.)

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[-] 30p87@feddit.de 5 points 9 months ago

async/await could be useful if one creates an entire program designed on and for it, but it stops being acceptable as soon as I need two .thens inside of each other because I tried to use fetch in a non-async app without race conditions

[-] shasta@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago

Observables are your friends

[-] fxdave@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago

Honestly, I don't get it.

Is it about the syntax sugar? Would you like to use callbacks instead?

Async programming is when you achive concurrency even with one thread. It's needed. There's no alternative to this.

[-] activ8r@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago
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[-] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 9 months ago

We're here asyncronously waiting for the rest of the meme.

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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
677 points (94.8% liked)

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